‘400 Days’: Despite its clichéd ingredients, Chetan Bhagat’s new novel is his most readable yet

Before I started writing this review, I watched Chetan Bhagat’s comedy special on One Mic Stand. He made a lot of fun of himself, which didn’t surprise me, but he made me laugh a couple of times, which did.

He also compared himself to Shakespeare (“Ask him, was Shakespeare looked down upon in his time? And he was.”). I have thoughts about that one.

400 Days, his latest novel, juggles several plot lines (told you he’s got better) of varying intensity – there’s the standard Bhagat-style love story about awkward dudes with limited prospects (professional and social) falling for porcelain-perfect women way out of their leagues; there’s our hero’s sidekick’s fitness journey; and at centre stage there’s the whodunnit – the Siya Arora missing child case.

Same characters

The police investigation having run its course with no results, Siya’s desperate mother Alia hears about some guy who runs a sort of part-time private investigation agency from his parents’ flat and seems to think something along the lines of, “Hey, maybe Some Guy the Private Eye can help out, what do we have to lose?” She’s filthy rich, for context. Also, in her defence, her twelve-year-old daughter is missing without a trace and I’m sure that does a number on a person.

In many ways 400 Days runs along familiar beats. The hero is, well, a standard Bhagat hero. Our Chetan clearly has – has had – a thing for underdogs who get the girl, which is fine, everyone likes underdogs and I am told there are also plenty of girl-getting enthusiasts out there. But even I, whose Bhagat library up until now consisted of about 2.5 books, recognised that all of his underdogs are the same kind of underdogs.

We meet Keshav – with middling professional prospects – when he’s failing to prepare or preparing to fail (borrowing a dad joke because reading Bhagat is weirdly exhausting) for the UPSC exam. He’s not gifted socially, either, and so little is said about the looks department that I am forced to assume the worst. Okay, that was an original joke.

We do know he’s reasonably fit and even has abs, courtesy envious references from his sidekick Saurabh “Golu” Maheshwari. Golu fits the Bhagat Hero mould even more squarely, in case you were wondering, and has the fat jokes hurled at him all the time to prove it.

Anyway, back to our scene. Keshav then leaves the room to have dinner with Indian Mom, Indian Dad, and their apathetic marriage, all of whose purpose in this novel is mostly to be conservative and naggy, and racist at south Indians with zero provocation. The variety is mostly in whether they’re complaining about marriage and jobs or whether they’re complaining about money and other people.

In fact, there are at two sets of Indian Mom and Dad in this novel, both entirely indistinguishable from each other - one of them also doubles up as an Indian Mother-In-Law, yes, exactly that kind. Multiple characters actually speculate she might be guilty of child abduction, just because the child in question was her daughter-in-law’s!

I won’t say whether or not they’re right in their suspicions, just that Durga Arora seems so TV-serial evil at times that it’s not even that far-fetched as an allegation. No doubt she also runs over stray kittens and plants cocaine on minors in her free time. This overwrought saas-bahu dynamic at least is actually lampshaded a few times by other characters, though, so at least it’s self-aware.

For the fans

I’m not going to pretend I went into this book with very high expectations - I went in teeth gritted, actually. But I’m here to write reviews, not run a cyber-bullying ring. So, yes, the novel is largely populated by stock characters in stock relationships, there’s no denying that.

I will say that Bhagat’s writing does seem to have matured, though, in some ways. Some of the conflicts feel a little contrived, but I would still say that the hero and heroine of 400 Days just seem like more evolved people than the characters in, say, 5-Point Someone or 2 States. Maybe I’m just out of the loop and Bhagat hit a new groove somewhere around...one of his books that I escaped.

The dialogue in this novel is very much still clunky and stilted – the ones from children and antagonists and lovers especially (yes, that’s 80% of the cast, leave me alone, I’m trying here) – but perhaps less so than the ones in Bhagat’s older novels. And I do think he’s gotten better at writing women, Indian Mom notwithstanding.

As a character, Alia The Love Interest is not as one-dimensional as she might have been, is what I mean. The sex scenes, mercifully, are all fade-to-black. The mystery plot – a combination of the Elizabeth Smart and Elizabeth Bechdel cases, incidentally – really does hold the attention, if a little derivative.

This is only slightly dimmed by the culprit doing an evil, villainous, dastardly confessional monologue at the end – you know, just to tie up any loose ends about how they did it for the reader – but maybe we can excuse that on grounds of they’re clearly crazy, what do I know. I also can’t really say much more about this without spoiling the ending, so let’s just move on to the ending.

I am trying to be as fair as possible when I say this – I don’t generally like Chetan Bhagat novels, and I didn’t particularly like this one. But it’s most likely one of the better Bhagat novels out there (unless he outdid himself in One Indian Girl, which nobody has made me read yet). If you like mystery/abduction stories, read Room by Emma Donoghue, which does a lot of this but better. But if you like Chetan Bhagat stories, read 400 Days. It’s one of his best – whatever that means.